Here’s a little research proving that a face-to-face request will profoundly increase the likelihood of getting the job done – in fact, it was 34 times more effective to eye-ball your requestee.

Most of us wouldn’t be too shocked to find that face-to-face outperforms text, so why do we still resort to the keyboard so often?

Well, according to assistant professor of Organisational Behaviour at the ILR School at Cornell University, Vanessa K. Bohns, it comes down to this:

“people tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication… the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests.”